Long Range Planning

Bridgestone of Japan acquired Firestone, a United States corporation, in early 1988. This article describes the integration process of the two organizations' cultures. There are many lessons in the approach that should apply to a variety of organizations. The Strategic Improvement Process, a rather highly structured approach, harnesses the strengths of both the Japanese and American organizations and starts the manufacturing and technical departments on the road to excellence.

American firms want 'total quality'. The time and money spent by U.S. companies attempting to qualify for the coveted Baldrige Award exemplifies corporate America's desire to achieve new quality standards. Corporate intelligence and 'total quality' are inextricably linked. In this article, the authors demonstrate how shared and properly-used information can be a powerful tool for elevating quality standards, and how corporate intelligence programmes can provide the information links vital for success in attaining the highest standards of quality.

One of the major problems facing senior executives is that of effecting significant strategic change in their organizations. This paper develops a number of explanatory frameworks which address the links between the development of strategy in organizations, dimensions of corporate culture and managerial action. In considering such linkages, and by illustrating them with examples from work undertaken in companies, the paper also seeks to advance our understanding of the problems and means of managing strategic change.

AIDS is a contemporary phenomena that has been extensively covered by the media but its impact on the employers of the sufferers is only now being measured and assessed. This article describes the personnel policies that have been developed by one particular organization to deal with the problem. Educational and training programmes have been initiated and management given clear directives to ensure that high morale and productivity are maintained during potentially adverse situations.

This article examines the potential of the use of cost benefit analysis in evaluating the performance of public libraries. The author describes an application in an Australian setting.

Needs assessment is an integral part of most comprehensive planning procedures. The needs assessment strategy presented in this article is appropriate for use when the problems and needs of social systems are to be considered. It is based on the logic of systems theory and especially on the concept of open systems and system networks.

This paper describes the service sector revolution in the United States and covers the automation of 10 U.S. service industries. It discusses the implications of the simultaneous automation of goods and services and suggests action required to smooth the transition for the worker as the United States becomes an automated society.

Strategic planning activities can, to varying degrees be anticipatory or hindsight in orientation. Anticipatory activities prepare the firm for future strategic surprises and enhance the firm's effectiveness in dealing with turbulence and unpredictability in the external environment. Hindsight activities on the other hand, rely greatly on ex-post analysis (of information on past events), emphasize efficiency in key processes and operations, and are predicated on reasonable continuity and stability in the external environment. While both sets of activities are necessary to maintain the balance between effectiveness and efficiency, a relatively greater emphasis on one set or the other is crucial under different degrees of environmental turbulence and unpredictability. Informed implementation of the appropriate degrees of anticipatory and hindsight orientations through differentially emphasizing separate sets of strategic planning activities should enable managers to exercise better strategic control and optimize the firm's short-run performance as well as long-term prospects.

A solution for preserving red blood cells (adenine) will make it possible to extend the life of blood from 21 to 35 days. Adenine supplementation may bring dramatic changes in blood outdating and the supply of blood to hospital blood banks. Substantial improvements, however, can be realized only if blood administrators are able to estimate the potential effects of adenine supplementation and set goals based on these projections. Appropriate action could then be taken to reduce blood collection and increase the supply of blood to hospitals. This paper offers a method for blood administrators to estimate the full effects of adenine supplementation and set reasonably attainable goals. Experiences with setting goals for a mid-western U.S. blood region are then discussed.

Corporate governance and the role of boards is a topic hotly debated in boardrooms, associations and media across the industrialized world. However intense, discussions are largely national phenomena due to the widespread belief that boards cannot be compared on an international plane. The authors argue the contrary: that there is a great deal to be learned from such comparisons because boards in different countries are more similar than they are different. Insights are drawn from a four-year study the authors have conducted involving boards from eight countries. The full results have been published earlier this year by Oxford University Press, as The Corporate Board; Confronting the Paradoxes.

Although the planning operation is regarded by some observers as unrealistic in conditions of rapid change and increasing competition, the discipline of strategic thinking and the need for strategic leadership continue to be of vital importance. The author examines the purpose of the Board of Directors and its role in the management of strategy.

For a long time, boards of directors have been considered weak, incapable of contributing to the financial success of their companies. This article proposes a way to revitalize boards by involving them in mapping corporate strategic directions. Building on recent changes in boardroom practices, it outlines eight conditions for an effective strategic contribution by boards and specifies areas of potential for an effective strategic contribution by boards and specifies areas of potential interest to directors. Taken together, these suggestions are expected to ensure continuous and disciplined contribution by boards to strategy and, ultimately, to effective corporate performance.

Jane Carmichael's views on Managing Inputs provide a further interesting contribution on a topic, strategic control, that we have covered on several occasions in this column. Carmichael's approach is to dig back behind the results being achieved to the 'inputs' on which they depend. But, while this may unearth causes of performance that can often be missed by a bottom-line orientation, results must ultimately remain vital; a business that is on track with all its input measures, but is missing its output goal is still in trouble. We continue to be interested in hearing from readers with views on strategic control processes, particularly those who have found productive ways of setting input and output targets.

Conventional capital budgeting systems do not fully reflect or adequately respond to the way in which capital expenditure decisions are actually made. Evidence also exists that the nature of this decision process is dependent on the type of the organization. This paper describes an empirically developed understanding of how capital expenditure decisions are being made, identifies ways to support and improve these decisions, and proposes an approach to linking the design of capital budgeting systems with the type of organization in which they are to operate.

This article explains the conceptual foundations for the piggybacking strategy from the general strategic management, adoption of innovation, product life cycle, specialization and diversified portfolio strategy literatures. The strategic piggybacking strategy is compared and contrasted with the diversified portfolio and specialization strategies. Intention, dynamic investment flow, short vs long term, and mission similarities and differences are addressed. A case is made for considering strategic piggybacking as a synthesis of the specialization and diversified portfolio strategies. The conditions appropriate for adoption of a piggybacking strategy are also discussed.

Much of the strategic preoccupation of senior managers in the 1990s is focusing on the creation of customer value. Companies are seeking competitive advantage by streamlining the three processes through which they interact with their customers: product creation, order handling and service assurance. 'Micro-strategy' is a term which has been coined for the trade-offs and decisions on where and how to streamline these three processes. The article discusses micro-strategies applied by successful companies.

Creating an adequate supply of the requisite skills and competitive capabilities is a fundamental objective of strategy. Managing this process in an effective and systematic manner is difficult. Employing the strategic staircase is a proven way of overcoming this difficulty. The framework enables managers to break the strategic agenda into bit-sized pieces, it guides the selection of priorities and provides a powerful device for communicating strategy throughout the organization, thereby bridging the gap between strategy and action.

S-curves are widely used for planning, forecasting and control of cost, time and resources of a project. In this paper, a comparison of two S-curve models developed at the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) and Bradford University is carried out both from the viewpoint of predictive accuracy and ease of use. The models are validated using expenditure data for 21 recent U.K. health building projects. Methods of least squares is used to estimate the parameters of the two models. These parameters are categorized according to the total cost of the projects. Both the models are shown to be of comparable accuracy for fitting actual expenditure data. The DHSS model has a major advantage of simplicity of form and use, although the slightly greater mathematical complexity of the Keller-Singh model is off-set by the readily interpretable nature of its form and basic parameters. It is concluded that both or either of the models could be used by clients/contractors for effective planning and control of project costs.

When an industry reaches a turning point, everyone in it is drawn into the turmoil. Not that it happens frequently, but most industries pass more than one major turning point in the course of an executive career of average length. The experience is unsettling--especially if preceded by a general reluctance to anticipate it or its consequences. Corporate strategy is usually concerned above all with the competitive positioning of a company within an industry or, if diversified, in a number of industries. To this two-dimensional picture, which takes the company and its competitors as the main variables, we need to add the changing background of the industry itself: a third dimension that challenges the powers of adaptation of all the competitors. It compels them to acknowledge as real the forces that are unleashed by time as industries mature and society changes. This paper explores the turning points that have occurred during the past 30 years in one particular industry--pharmaceuticals--and seeks to distil from it a number of lessons that may be relevant to industrial strategy in a wider framework.

Planning in health care organizations is of considerable current interest in this country. Furthermore, effective planning processes require, as a necessary condition for that effectiveness, development within a framework which considers the organizational, managerial and service delivery environment.This paper examines the concept of planning in relation to health care organizations. Through an examination of the effects which proper planning can have upon industrial organizations the authors analyze the possible impacts of planning procedures upon health care institutions. Their analysis leads to certain tentative conclusions as to appropriate organizational structure which could support effective planning. Whilst the authors have yet to test their hypothesis the conclusion they draw from their initial analysis are worthy of further investigation.

This article presents a managerial perspective on health planning by the Federal Government illustrated by the case of the Swine Flu Immunization Program. The recent national program in the U.S.A. for immunizing the entire population against the swine flu is examined in terms of the processes of health planning. It is concluded that this program was poorly planned and therefore doomed to failure from the beginning. Recommendations for improved planning of similar programs are made.

There is no substitute for human blood and the demand for blood to use in modern surgical procedures in increasing significantly faster than the population. Numerous management science reseachers have recognized the need to improve the management of the blood resource. This paper is the first effort directed towards annual planning of the operation of a regional blood system. One main point of the paper is that no matter how well inventory is controlled on a day to day basis, the blood administrator must have an annual plan to attain the goals of a blood service organization. The model formulated in this study can help a regional blood administrator determine the magnitude of the blood collection effort and the size of the regional blood inventory. The decision method developed is based on multiple objective techniques and is especially relevant to health car delivery problems. An example of the procedure is then applied to a large urban-rural blood region located in the eastern United States.

This study of 108 corporations is intended to identify and validate those strategic control factors that contribute directly to the success of strategic decisions made at the level of the CEO which are subsequently implemented throughout the organization. In direct response to a comprehensive questionnaire, 61 CEOs rated nine strategic control factors. Only the ratings of CEOs were accepted and processed in this study. Their ratings revealed areas of obvious strength and correctable weakness in their perceptions of strategic control within their respective organizations. These ratings tended to validate a conceptual process model of strategic control.